Musings on World events from the perspective of a Social and an Economic Liberal.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Are you thinking what they're thinking?

As the Conservatives and their blinkered friends in "Migration Watch" continue to pedal their warped ideas about immigration, it was interesting to get some information about British emigration overseas. In recent years we have heard a lot from the Tories about refusing to let in "non-European immigration" to the UK. Fascinating to notice that apart from Spain, most Brits chose to leave the UK and go to... Non European destinations.

A good thing that the New Zealanders are not arguing "send them back" then.

The fact is that emigration/immigration are subjects that are far to complicated to be debated using the language of the Daily Mail.

So, by all means let us discuss the question of migration, only please, without the misrepresentations and distortions of "Migration Watch" and the Tory party.

4 comments:

I think that this is the problem, people have visceral responses to suggested numbers. Not enough people actually do serious analysis not only of the total numbers, but things like length of stay- Perhaps 600,000 Poles have come to the UK, but since we do not keep accurate rcords of who leaves, neither the Polish embassy nor the Home Office actually knows how many Poles are here at any given time.

Meanwhile we frame the debate entirely without reference to the more than 5 million British citizens overseas.